The Cloud Report

Red Hat OpenShift Public PaaS Is Finally Available

After more than a year in beta, Red Hat this week used the annual Red Hat Summit in Boston to announce that its OpenShift-based public Platform as a Service (PaaS) is now available.

The new OpenShift Online Service, which starts at $20 per month, is geared toward developers looking to build and host applications in a PaaS-based cloud. Red Hat emphasized the fact that the service supports multiple languages, including Java, Ruby, PHP, Python, Node.js and Perl.

The service is built on the OpenShift Origin open source project and is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the SELinux subsystem, Red Hat said, noting it's built on a multi-tenant architecture. Enterprise developers and ISV partners can tap into partner extensions or build their own add-ons via the OpenShift pluggable cartridge framework.

Since its public preview in 2011, Red Hat said developers have created more than 1 million applications.

Also, Red Hat this week announced a partnership with Mirantis, which, as I reported last week, received a $10 million round in venture funding. The two will jointly optimize Mirantis Fuel, the set of configuration and deployment libraries for OpenStack, the open source Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform.

The two companies said they will optimize Fuel to offer visual deployment and management of Red Hat OpenStack, as well as offer a shared reference architecture. The two companies' professional services and consulting organizations will jointly offer customer support.

Now Red Hat and Hortonworks' respective engineering teams will work together to reduce the cost of a Hadoop cluster by 50 percent since users will be able to run Hadoop on a POSIX-compliant storage node.

The companies will work together on the Apache Ambari project, an open source effort to manage Hadoop-based file systems such as GlusterFS. The goal is to provide a standard way to provision, deploy, monitor and manage Hadoop with different file systems.

Under the extended partnership, Red Hat and Hortonworks also said they will create generic test suites designed to validate interoperability between Hadoop and other file systems. The companies said they will contribute these test suites to the open source community.